6. Industria pays the bills for a large chunk of the population at the end of the day (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), and given human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution, human quality of life would probably be a lot worse without it (see expansion in healthcare, decrease in disease burden, and other stuff).

The answer is not to go all anarcho-primitivist and stuff but, at least with respect to the whole 'industria vs. wilderness' thing going on, make industria a place amenable to wilderness. There are plenty of smaller efforts out there to change, for example, monoculture practices in agriculture.

Notably, in his references to agriculture and other things technological, he doesn't actually cite many papers from these fields that have, as a centerpiece, actual data analysis. Here is the list, out of 127 sources, of 18 sources from either journals that generally require some kind of data analysis or otherwise concrete stuff to analyze or publications which, it can be inferred from the title, probably use data to advance their thesis:

BOARDMAN, R., ed. 1992 Canadian Environmental Policy: Ecosystems, Politics, and Process (Toronto, Ontario: Oxford University Press)

CANADIAN ENDANGERED SPECIES CONSERVATION COUNCIL 2001 Wild Species 2000: The General Status of Species in Canada (Ottawa, Ontario: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada)

FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS 2003a KOPASSUS Army Special Force Command Federation of American Scientists website. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/indonesia/kopassus.htm (accessed 17 November 2003)

HARRIS, L. 1995 ‘The east coast fisheries’ in Resource and Environmental Management in Canada, ed B. Mitchell (Toronto, Ontario: Oxford University Press) 130–150

HECHT, S., and COCKBURN, A. 1989 The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (London: Verso)

JACKSON, J.B.C., KIRBY, M.X., BERGER, W.H., BJORNDAL, L.W., BOTSFORD, K.A., BOURQUE, B.J., BRADBURY, R.H., COOKE, R., ERLANDSON, J., ESTES, J.A., HUGHES, T.P., KIDWELL, S., LANGE, C.B., LENIHAN, H.S., PANDOLFI, J.M., PETERSON, C.H., STENECK, R.S., TEGNER, M.J. and WARNER, R.R. 2001 ‘Historical overfishing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems’ Science 293(5530—27 July 2003), 629–638

KARL, T.R., and TRENBERTH, K.E. 2003 ‘Modern global climate change’ Science 302(5651—5 December 2001), 1719–1723

KAUFMAN, D.G., and FRANZ, C.M. 1993 Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers)

MARGULIS, L. 1998 Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution (New York: Basic Books) (written by Lynn Margulis, an actual biologist, but this book is mostly an advancement of the Gaia hypothesis, which is the target of not unconsiderable criticism by other actual biologists; she was influential in advancing endosymbiotic theory, which turns out to be correct, and at the same time, later in life she became an AIDS denialist. Make your own evaluation here.)

MCGINNIS, M.V., ed. 1999 Bioregionalism (London: Routledge)

MCTAGGART, W.D. 1993 ‘Bioregionalism and regional geography: place, people, and networks’ The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 37(4), 307–319

NAYLOR, R.L., EAGLE, J. and SMITH, W.L. 2003 ‘Salmon aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest: a global industry with local impacts’ Environment 45(8), 18–39

PERRY, D.A. 1988 ‘An overview of sustainable forestry’ Journal of Pesticide Reform 8(3), 8–12

RESOURCE FUTURES INTERNATIONAL 2001 Persistent Organic Pollutants and the StockholmConvention:A ResourceGuide Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank website (accessed 4 August 2003)

SANDBERG, L.A. 1991 ‘Forest policy in Nova Scotia: the big lease, Cape Breton Island, 1899–1960’ Acadiensis 20(2), 105–128

SAUER, C.O. 1963 (orig. 1925) ‘Plant and animal destruction in ancient history’ in Land and Life, ed J. Leighly (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) 145–154

WILLIAMS, M. 1989 ‘Deforestation: past and present’ Progress in Human Geography 13(2), 176–208

ZIMMERER, K.S. 1994 ‘Human geography and the ‘‘new ecology’’: the prospect and promise of integration’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84(1), 108–125

The rest is shit with titles like "Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity" or "The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History" or "The trouble with wilderness, or getting back to the wrong nature" or "Ecological metaphors of security: world politics in the biosphere" or "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" (wtf) or "Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze" or "‘They’ve got no stake in where they’re at’’: radical ecology, the Fourth World and local identity in the Bella Coola region" or "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War" or "Beyond sovereign territory: the space of ecopolitics" or "Against His-story, Against Leviathan!" or "Socialism and monotheism: a response to Jenson and Keyman" or "Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization" or "Place and Placelessness" or "Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society" or "War and state making as organized crime" or "A Christian reading of the global economy" or "Deleuze in the postcolonial: on nomads and indigenous politics".

Hell, he even cites The Matrix. Yes, the movie.

In short, I can't take seriously anyone who's trying to publish a commentary on stuff describable by data whose argument doesn't rely very much on it. I mean, hell, he refers to publications by Nietzsche and Spinoza, who, while they were influential philosophers, were decidedly not data wranglers, and there's even a reference titled 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West', which sounds... pretty fucking wacky.

Knowledge ain't such a bad thing.